A Brief History of Liberty

By David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan

Through a fusion of philosophical, social scientific, and historical methods, A Brief History of Liberty provides a comprehensive, philosophically-informed portrait of the elusive nature of one of our most cherished ideals.

• Offers a succinct yet thorough survey of personal freedom
• Explores the true meaning of liberty, drawing philosophical lessons about liberty from history
• Considers the writings of key historical figures from Socrates and Erasmus to Hobbes, Locke, Marx, and Adam Smith
• Combines philosophical rigor with social scientific analysis
• Argues that liberty refers to a range of related but specific ideas rather than limiting the concept to one definition

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781444358797

Book preview

Introduction: Conceptions of Freedom

THESIS: There are several forms of liberty. Whether they are conflicting or complementary is a matter of historical circumstance.

History, it has been said, is the field of study in which one cannot begin at the beginning.¹ Telling a story requires decisions that could have been made differently – in particular, where to start the story. For philosophers, the story often begins with the task of clarifying the topic. For many of them this is where the story ends, too, but this is not that kind of book. This is a history of liberty, not a history of theorizing about liberty. Still, the topic calls for a clarifying philosophical introduction.

Histories of Liberties

What, then, does it mean to be free? Like many core philosophical concepts, the concept of liberty is not easy to pin down. Ludwig Wittgenstein observed that we talk about games with ease, even though it is not easy to say what a game is. Solitaire, football, Dungeons and Dragons, chess, and hopscotch are games. But is there anything important that they all have in common? Do the things we call games share a common essence in virtue of which the term ‘game’ properly applies? Wittgenstein thought not. We could say that all games involve forms of play, but that is only to say that we use the word ‘play’ as we use the word ‘game,’ to refer to a range of activities whose differences are obvious but whose similarities are obscure. Part of Wittgenstein’s point is that we often know how to use words like ‘game’ or ‘liberty’ well enough to communicate with no apparent difficulty, even when we lack a precise recipe for how to use these words. Languages evolve over centuries as tools we use to convey information and ideas about issues that actually arise in our living together. Moreover, we are constantly running into cases that are in some way novel or ambiguous, and our linguistic practices do not resolve them in advance. The historical fact about language in general is that we revise our categories as we go, as needed. The edges (if not the cores) of our categories are fluid, which is part of what makes our categories as adaptable, and thus as useful, as they are.

Part of our job as philosophers is to make our language, concepts, and questions more precise. This job is never easy. As Nietzsche once noted, only that which has no history is definable.² Liberty, however we define it, has a history. Partly because of that, defining it is indeed a serious problem. In ordinary discourse, we use the terms ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ to refer to various ideas; these are related in important ways, but there may not be any essence that the ideas all share. Or, if there is a shared essence, we may not be able to say exactly what it is. Perhaps the things we call freedom bear a ‘family resemblance’ to each other. That is, in a large family we may observe that two siblings have the same nose, while two others have the same chin or hair color. Even if no characteristic is shared by every sibling, overlapping patterns of family resemblance still mark the siblings as members of the same family.

Perhaps free speech and free trade are usefully viewed as members of the same family.³ They may turn out to have a history of going hand in hand, even though they are logically separable. Here we categorize forms of liberty as much as our present purpose requires. We don’t assume there is any essence awaiting our discovery; neither do we assume otherwise.

Freedom from and freedom to

Isaiah Berlin describes two kinds of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty.’ (Berlin uses the terms interchangeably, and so do we.) We often equate being free with an absence of constraints, impediments, or interference. For instance, the American Constitution protects freedom of speech by prohibiting Congress from passing laws that constrain speech. Berlin called this a negative liberty. Negative liberty connotes freedom from – that is, from constraints or interference. The ‘great contrast’ between it and positive liberty is that the latter has to do with self-government. The positive sense of liberty, Berlin says, is in play when the question is not How far does government interfere with me? but rather Who governs me?.⁴

Berlin is often interpreted as trying to draw the following contrast. Someone is free – free to as opposed to free from – when she has a relevant capacity. So, for a bird to be free to fly, it must have wings and energy to take off. It is not enough that no one stops the bird. For me to be in this sense free to fly implies that I have a working aircraft at my disposal, and not merely that flight control has cleared me for takeoff. Positive freedom in this sense – freedom to – connotes possession of a relevant resource or capability. But, however illuminating this contrast may be (and we will come back to it), Berlin’s original aim seems to have been to draw a related but different contrast between being free from constraints, especially constraints imposed by others, and positive freedom, conceived of as exercising whatever capabilities one has in an autonomous way.⁵ In different words, the distinction between positive and negative freedom is a distinction between being free to choose goals of one’s own and being unimpeded in pursuing those goals.

Berlin sees negative (political) liberty as an absence of obstacles imposed by others.⁶ Thus he says:

If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. … You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings. Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom.⁷

Berlin’s negative/positive metaphor naturally suggests that the two categories are supposed, jointly, to exhaust the possibilities. Not so. Berlin says that historians have documented two hundred ways of using the term, and he is writing only about two central ones.⁸

According to human rights activist Natan Sharansky, the simple and ultimate test of whether you live in a free society boils down to the following question: can you speak your mind without fear?⁹ The locutions ‘free from’ and ‘free to’ are merely handy figures of speech, and here is a case where they can mislead.¹⁰ We would naturally speak of being free to speak one’s mind; but what Sharansky means is being free from laws or tyrants who suppress opinions, rather than having the technological or rhetorical capabilities necessary for effectively expressing one’s opinions to any given audience. Nothing stops us from being concerned about the latter, but as a matter of fact Sharansky’s concern, and the concern of the framers of the US Constitution, was about freedom of speech as a negative freedom.

Benjamin Constant, writing in the wake of the French Revolution, distinguished the ‘liberty of the ancients’ from the ‘liberty of the moderns.’ Constant’s idea is that the liberty of the ancients involves active participation in government, whereas the liberty of the moderns is more a matter of having control over one’s own life within the rule of law.

According to Constant, a citizen of modern England, France, or America conceives of liberty as a

right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims.¹¹

Constant continues:

Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients. The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace … But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.¹²

As we interpret Berlin and Constant, what Constant calls ‘liberty of the ancients’ is one example of what Berlin calls ‘positive freedom.’ Specifically, the liberty of the ancients is a collective form of freedom: people being free to deliberate and to choose their own goals. What Constant calls ‘liberty of the moderns’ is, by contrast, an example of what Berlin calls ‘negative freedom’; it is, specifically, an individual form of freedom from external impediments.

A brief history of liberty cannot cover everything. We concentrate on liberty in its individual forms. However, we do not neglect the topic of collective freedom altogether. Our Prehistory chapter discusses a collective form of negative freedom, namely being free from subjugation by neighboring nations, while our Civil Rights chapter discusses a collective positive freedom – the empowering of subjugated groups.

Working toward an analysis of the concept of freedom is a theoretical task, but many claim that the consequences of the exercise are not merely theoretical. Constant wrote that confusing the two (that is, the ancient and the modern) conceptions of liberty was in the all too famous days of our revolution, the cause of many an evil. France was exhausted by useless experiments, the authors of which, irritated by their poor success, sought to force her to enjoy the good she did not want, and denied her the good which she did want.¹³ Likewise, after distinguishing between negative and positive liberty, Isaiah Berlin went on to say that the two are not merely different conceptual categories, but rival political ideals, with conflicting implications about the proper role and scope of government.¹⁴ Right or wrong, Constant and Berlin make the debate more interesting, for their assumption that different conceptions of liberty entail different political regimes recasts the semantic issue as a political one, where the debate is not merely about how to use the language but about how to use the police.

The remainder of this chapter identifies some of the many forms of liberty. Later chapters discuss the histories of some (but not all) of these forms.¹⁵

Negative liberty

(a) Hobbes describes liberty as an absence of external impediments.¹⁶

By external impediments, Hobbes meant obstacles that may oft take away part of a man’s power to do what he would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgment, and reason shall dictate to him.¹⁷ On Hobbes’s view, any obstacle whatever is an impediment to liberty.

(b) More specifically, we can define ‘liberty’ as an absence of impediments imposed by other people.

Suppose some obstacle leaves me unable to move my car. Perhaps a tree fell on it. Or perhaps you parked in a way that boxed me in. I am impeded either way, yet the latter is a different kind of impediment; because, if you imposed it, then we can ask whether the law should forbid your imposing such obstacles. This is what Berlin seems to have had in mind when he discussed political freedom.

(c) Even more specifically, we can define ‘liberty’ as an absence of obstacles deliberately imposed by other people.

Your unknowingly parking in my favorite parking spot is not the same as your deliberately parking there, in the knowledge that I always park there. Either act renders me unfree to park in my customary spot, yet they leave me in different situations. The accidental parking is a mere inconvenience. If I take this inconvenience personally, I am overreacting. To take my spot deliberately, though, is to send me some sort of signal – perhaps that I don’t command as much respect as I thought. The accident may leave me feeling irritated in a way, but it does not leave me wondering what you are trying to tell me.

Consider another example. Your accidentally running over my bicycle is, morally, not the same as your deliberately running over it. Either act leaves me unable to ride my bicycle; but the accident requires you to apologize, me to accept your apology, and both of us to do the kinds of things neighbors do to make sure there are no hard feelings. (You should offer to fix the bike, at which point I should consider whether I was at fault to leave the bike in harm’s way.) The deliberate assault, though, requires me to defend myself rather than to be a good neighbor. This example marks the difference between an accidental and a deliberate imposition; and now the moral overtones of the difference are unmistakable.

(d) Accordingly, we can define ‘liberty’ as an absence of obstacles wrongfully imposed by other people.

Suppose you tow my car away because I was illegally and dangerously parked, and you are a duly appointed official hired to do such things. Compare this to a situation where you tow my car away because it is a lawless town and towing my car is your way of extorting money from me for the car’s return. In the second case, I am furious and perhaps terrified. In the first case, by contrast, I am irritated and disappointed, but I cannot tell myself that the obstacle to my driving away was wrongfully imposed. I decided to park in a certain way, but I cannot tell myself that my decision to park in that dangerous and illegal way ought to have been respected. When you interfere with my deciding to park there, you are in the right, not me. So, the issue highlighted by this definition concerns obstacles that create grounds for complaint.

Although Locke and Hobbes had negative conceptions, each of them seeing liberty as an absence of obstacles, Locke’s characterization of it is slightly moralized:

the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom … where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others … freedom is not … a liberty for everyman to do what he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) ….¹⁸

Two centuries later, in 1881, T. H. Green would agree that freedom, rightly understood, is not a mere absence of impediments. In particular, We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man at a cost of a loss of freedom to others.¹⁹ Moreover,

When we measure the progress of society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves. Thus, though of course there can be no freedom among men who act not willingly but under compulsion, the mere enabling a man to do as he likes, is in itself no contribution to true freedom.²⁰

One way to understand Green is to see him as holding that real freedom has two parts: our having opportunities to perfect ourselves in cooperation with others, and our taking responsibility for pursuing such opportunities in a way that does not compromise the opportunities of others. On this reading, real freedom on Green’s view is not freedom from responsibility but freedom to be responsible: responsible, namely, for pursuing our own perfection and for making sure we do no harm in the process. Note that Green’s conception of freedom is not essentially individualistic. We can freely take responsibility for ourselves as individuals, to be sure, but we can also take responsibility for ourselves as a group (as members of a family, community, church, mutual aid society, or business). So long as we are not, as Green says, under compulsion, the form of responsibility we take will be a form of freedom.²¹

On any of these conceptions, we might want to say that potential as well as actual impediments could compromise our liberty. Suppose I am a slave, but my master never tells me what to do. If as a matter of fact I live as I choose, it makes sense to say I have more freedom than other slaves have. But it also makes sense to say I am not as free as people who similarly live as they choose but have no master, because mine could at any moment start ordering me around.

On a negative conception of liberty, it will be a matter of historical contingency whether a given liberty makes for happier or healthier or wealthier lives. Negative liberties are not guaranteed to make us better off, but neither is vitamin C, or exercise – so guarantees can be beside the point. The point of negative liberty has less to do with what liberty guarantees and more to do with what liberty gives people the chance to do for themselves.

There is a difference between guaranteeing in the sense of rendering inevitable (as when government price controls render shortages inevitable) and guaranteeing in the sense of expressing a firm intention (as when government declares no child will be left behind). Clearly, guaranteeing something in the latter sense is no guarantee in the former sense. A legal guarantee expresses the government’s commitment to produce some result, but this doesn’t mean that the government will in fact produce that result. Imagine a world where, every time a government legally guarantees that people will achieve a given level of welfare, an evil demon makes sure that people do not. In that world, if you wanted people to be well off, you wouldn’t want to be issuing legal guarantees. You’d permit people to be badly off, because that would be their only chance to prosper in that demonplagued world.

Of course, we don’t live in a world of evil demons, so perhaps the example is irrelevant. Yet plenty of factors in this world can and do disrupt, corrupt, or pervert our best-laid plans and legal guarantees. Therefore imagining a world devoid of corruption and of unintended consequences is no more relevant than imagining a world of evil demons. We have to check how legal guarantees actually work in our world.

Despite the lack of guarantees, history may well reveal that respecting negative liberties has a long, successful, non-accidental track record of making for better lives. In any case, we won’t settle any debate about what negative liberty does for people by conceptual analysis alone.²² We need to investigate what happens to people when negative liberties are reasonably secure, and what happens when they are not.

Positive liberty

(e) In a more positive vein, we can treat freedom as an ability to do what we want rather than as an absence of impediments. Berlin would reject this notion in an analysis of political freedom (whether positive or negative). Berlin, as has been noted, would not label the inability to jump ten feet in the air a lack of political freedom, unless the inability in question were caused by other people.²³ Still, even if such inabilities have no bearing on political freedom, they remain a part of the conceptual landscape of positive freedom.

Many Greeks of Plato’s time conceived of freedom as a capacity for living a certain lifestyle. Having to work for a living was close to being a slave. Wage workers work under duress, or so it was thought. But if this is a contentious idea (one that Berlin and quite possibly Constant would have rejected), its undeniable grain of truth is that there is a difference between being independently wealthy and not being so. In ancient times being independently wealthy meant having time – being able to enjoy leisure. Nowadays even average workers are independently wealthy in this sense. They work eight hours a day, not fourteen. Typically they work five days a week, not seven.

Even on this positive (in particular, capacity-oriented) view of freedom, though, it will be a contingent matter whether increasing freedom makes for better lives. Parents want better lives for their children, but does this mean that they want their child to be free to drive the family car? Not necessarily. Even when we are adults, some of our wants are self-destructive, and having the power to satisfy them won’t necessarily be good for us: it will depend on the nature of these wants, or on our level of maturity. Maturity is partly a matter of being free to satisfy self-destructive wants without actually giving in to them. Maturity is, likewise, a matter of acknowledging that actions have consequences, and that the consequences of one’s actions are something for which one should take responsibility.

For these sorts of reasons, Plato rejected conceiving of positive freedom as an effective license to do what we want. He worried that people could be slaves to their desires. He viewed freedom more as a capacity for effective self-governance than as a capacity to satisfy one’s appetites.²⁴ Plato would have been more sympathetic to something like the following:

(f) Moralizing the previous definition, we can think of freedom as a power to do what is right.

(g) Kant distinguished between the grounds of dignity and the grounds of full moral worth.²⁵ A person’s dignity consists of being at liberty to choose to respect the moral law, as per (f). By contrast, a person’s full moral worth, and the fullest realization of freedom, involve not only possessing liberty in the sense of (f) but going ahead and exercising it, out of reverence for moral law. Rousseau in France, like his contemporary Kant in Prussia, spoke of freedom as obedience to a law one prescribes for oneself.²⁶ Chapter 6 discusses what it takes to achieve something like (g) when one already has achieved freedom in the sense of (f).

(h) We can define ‘freedom’ as a power to do what is right, free from all temptation to do otherwise.

Conception (h) leaves room for stressing that there are internal as well as external impediments to freedom. Moreover, it explicitly incorporates both positive (freedom to) and negative (freedom from) elements.²⁷ Where Hobbes’s conception often is interpreted as being more like (a), Kant’s conception of what it is like to be truly, fully free (to be a holy will) was more like (h). This Kantian conception (which has roots in Aristotle’s discussion of weakness of will and in Plato’s discussion of the tyrannical soul) is moralized; it is a power to do what is right, unimpeded by contrary desire.

These last two conceptions of freedom raise a question: Is living by morality a form of servitude or of freedom? Morality demands that I do some things and refrain from doing others. Does this make me unfree? We can answer this question in more than one way; but, here too, in order to answer the question clearly, we need to be clear about how we are using the terms. In this case, the question is not empirical. We settle the question by analyzing ordinary language together with some stipulation, not by gathering social scientific observations.

For example, we may choose to place weight on ideas like the following: A person of integrity (as we understand this notion) may be unwilling to act against her principles, yet the constraints under which she lives were not arbitrarily imposed by her parents or some other authority figure. Instead, they are self-imposed. She may not dictate the content of moral law. (She cannot simply decide whether telling the truth is moral law.) However, she does freely choose to respect it. In a way, she seems freest of all. You may have heard the legend of Martin Luther saying before a court, Here I stand, I can do no other. If Luther really could not have brought himself to act against his principles, does this make him unfree, or free?

Consider a poetic remark of Viktor Frankl’s. It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.²⁸ Frankl’s remark implicitly suggests that we are here on this earth for a reason. We have a mission. A typical reader finds remarks like Frankl’s to be inspiring rather than stifling. Why?

(i) We note the possibility of a whole family of related conceptions according to which liberty is a power to do what we want, without self-imposed baggage (in other words being free of commitments or, more generally, free of plans, promises, hang-ups, and selfconceptions that no longer fit the person one has become).

This conception of freedom (i), unlike (h), is not moralized. John Stuart Mill’s idea of a free person is that of a person whose desires and impulses are his own – are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture …²⁹ This conception of fully rational self-direction comes closer to what Berlin seems to have meant by positive freedom.³⁰ Persons who are free in this sense are autonomous: legally, politically, and psychologically in a position to decide for themselves what their lives are for.

This sort of psychological freedom, and the way it relates to other forms of freedom, is the subject of our final chapter. Here we leave the discussion with a question: Insofar as freedom involves being able to do what one wants, does this mean that we can be more free simply by not wanting very much? If we are not at liberty to emigrate, can we avoid this being a limitation on our freedom simply by talking ourselves into not wanting to emigrate?³¹ The connection between being free and getting what we want is subtle, and only partly a matter of linguistic convention.

Republican freedom

Philip Pettit says: "The negative conception of freedom as noninterference and the positive conception of freedom as self-mastery are not

Reviews for A Brief History of Liberty

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting review of the concepts of liberty & freedom through history. From a libertarian perspective but not unduly biased, I don't think.